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Fondren Digital Scholarship Services

Welcome to the Fondren Digital Scholarship Services newsletter! In this publication, we highlight services, tools and collections of interest to the Rice community. We also share staff news and spotlight recent collaborations. Additional information about Digital Scholarship Services can be found on the Fondren website.

We welcome feedback on this newsletter and questions about Digital Scholarship Services. Contact cds@rice.edu or 713-348-2480.

Summer Data Workshops Offered Online

The Data @ Rice Workshop Series, sponsored by Fondren Library and the Center for Research Computing, provides hands-on training in the basics of organizing, documenting, analyzing, and visualizing your data. Summer sessions will be offered via Zoom and Canvas. Course descriptions and registration can be found on the library website .

New Series Explores "Open"

Want to learn more about open access, open educational resources, and open data? Want to share your wins and challenges working in the open? Join Fondren Library staff for Open Cafe, a new “bite-sized” workshop series modeled after a program of the same name at North Carolina State University. Join us each month for brief presentations (10-15 minutes) and relaxed, coffeeshop-style chats about “open” topics. Summer sessions will be held via Zoom.

Finding Open Educational Resources
Wednesday, June 16, 10:00-10:30 am
Open educational resources (OER) can help reduce student costs and provide an opportunity for instructors to customize content for their courses. If you're interested in open textbooks or other types of OER, but aren’t sure where or how to find them, this is the session for you. Join us for a brief overview of OER repositories and learn how to find the most relevant instructional resources for your course.

Evaluating Open Access Journals
Wednesday, July 21, 10:00-10:30 am
Are you considering submitting your work to an open access (OA) journal, but aren’t sure of its quality or if it’s the right fit for your work? In this session, we’ll look at the questions you should ask when selecting a journal and provide some resources for finding and evaluating journals.

Getting Started with Open Access Publishing
Wednesday, August 18, 10:00-10:30 am
Are you interested in increasing the impact of your work by making it available worldwide? Or maybe a grant requires that you make your work publicly available? This session will provide a few simple steps to begin publishing your work open access.

Register for any of the Summer 2021 sessions here: https://forms.gle/Jz7beTJoUC7uXdxz6

Zoom info will be shared with participants via email one day before the session.
Sessions with fewer than 4 registrants will be canceled.

Questions? Contact sk60@rice.edu.

News from the Digital Media Commons

The Digital Media Commons supports the creation and use of multimedia in education, scholarship, and creative expression. Working toward this end, Commons staff provide services that include hands-on training, assistance with digital projects, and access to the essential tools for creating digital resources such as digital video and audio, images and animations, PowerPoint presentations, web pages, and more.

Check out the DMC Project Gallery website! It has a fresh new look! The website showcases DMC’s support for different courses, research graphics as well as media projects across campus. If you are interested in incorporating a media project into your course, having an in-class training workshop, creating an illustrative graphic or 3D model for your research, the posted samples can help you develop some ideas.
In Spring 2021, Ian Mellor-Crummey, DMC digital media support specialist, helped create a virtual campus tour 360 degree video for the Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies. Now he and a student worker are working on 360 degree videos for Fondren Library to add more visual content to Fondren 101.
In Fall 2020, Mario Norton, DMC supervisor, collaborated with Jinho Hyon, an assistant research scientist from Department of Material Science and Engineering, for an illustrative graphics for a research paper Extreme Energy Dissipation via Material Evolution in Carbon Nanotube Mats that is published online at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/advs.202003142. For more details, go to http://dmcgallery.rice.edu/2021/03/03/material-science-graphics/.
To take a DMC summer Zoom short course, sign up at https://library.rice.edu/requests/dmc-short-course-registration

Events Highlight Digital Humanities

Two Spring 2021 events highlighted recent digital humanities projects at Rice. In February, Sheila A. Brennan, a Senior Program Officer in the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities, conducted a workshop that highlighted funded projects from Texas, HBCUs, and liberal arts colleges, emphasizing programs with special calls for HBCUs and Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI).

In May, a Digital Humanities Showcase highlighted innovative projects at Rice that use computing to advance the study of the humanities. Presenters included:

Anne Chao, “Network of Words: A Co-Occurrence Analysis of Nation-Building Terms in the Writings of Liang Qichao and Chen Duxiu”
Farès el-Dahdah, “Data at the Intersection of Time and Space: The Spatial Studies Lab at Rice.”
Steven Lewis and Brandon Zheng, “China Urban Outdoor Propaganda Archive, 1998 to 2019”
John Mulligan, “Preliminary Notes on (and Anticipated Opportunities for) Rice’s Migration of SlaveVoyages to Cloud Infrastructure”

Both events were sponsored by the Rice University Digital Humanities Group, which brings together faculty, students and staff with an interest exploring the cultural, scholarly and educational significance of digital resources and technologies for the humanities and social sciences. If you are interested in participating in this group, please contact Lisa Spiro, Executive Director of Digital Scholarship Services, at lspiro@rice.edu.

Want to Increase the Impact of Your Work?

Back by popular demand, we’re repeating this series, originally held in February 2021. New and repeat participants are welcome!

Want to increase the impact of your work? Sign up to join Fondren Library’s Scholarly Impact Challenge!

Held July 19-23, 2021, the Scholarly Impact Challenge is designed to help members of the Rice community better manage their scholarly presence and increase the impact of their work. Sign up to receive a daily email from the library containing instructions for easy--but impactful--activities, like setting up ORCID and Google Scholar, making your work available in online repositories, and thinking about social media use. Repeat participants can look for "bonus challenges" to build on previous work.

Sign up here to participate.

Have a question? Contact Fondren Library Digital Scholarship Services at cds@rice.edu

Task Force Evaluates Repository Software

The Rice Digital Scholarship Archive (RDSA), Rice's institutional repository, is a web site where the university's intellectual output is shared, managed, searched, and preserved. Most materials come from Rice faculty members' research, electronic theses and dissertations, and digitized collections of rare or unique books, images, musical performances, and manuscripts. The archive currently runs on DSpace, an open source software package.

Since the archive was created, the landscape for institutional repositories has evolved. In addition to DSpace, a number of repository platforms have gained large user communities and unique capabilities. To guide the process of making a decision about Fondren’s institutional repository software, Fondren Library has convened an Institutional Repository Software Evaluation Task Force. This ad-hoc group will define the requirements for repository software that will meet Rice’s needs for the next five to ten years, actively consult with stakeholders (including RDSA contributors and users), carefully consider the choices for repository platforms (including by interviewing current users of leading platforms and testing the most compelling options), and recommend whether Rice should continue with DSpace or switch to a different platform-- or even multiple platforms for different types of materials. Final recommendations will be shared in 2022.

Fondren Library, Rice University | Digital Scholarship Services | Houston, TX 77005
Email: cds@rice.edu | Web: http://library.rice.edu/dss | Blog: http://digitalscholarship.blogs.rice.edu/